Saturday, November 08, 2014

I signed up for this event in 2012, but missed it due to a sprained ankle. This year I got sick for a few weeks in Oct so I made this my last race of the season. I was highly confident going in, because I ran the Patapsco Valley 50K two weeks ago and that course was harder.

Once again we lucked out with the weather. It was sunny and cool and couldn't have been any better!

I ran with my friend Amy, who was coming off an injured ankle suffered several months ago. Given that neither of us was in peak condition ;) we were really just looking forward to a nice gentle trail run in beautiful weather, so our plan was to just take it really easy and enjoy ourselves.

The event starts at a pavilion inside the park, follows a road out-and-back to the perimeter trail, and is then 3 counter-clockwise laps on the perimeter trail. I've run at Rosaryville dozens of times and have always measured the trail to be ~9.2 mi in length, so as we started the event some quick math told me this event would be a little shorter than 50K/31mi. My Garmin wound up with 29.3 mi, so 1.7 short (plus or minus whatever GPS inaccuracies that day) but that's fine. I think events have to work with the terrain they have and sometimes a ridiculous out-and-back or tiny loop just to make the distance works out is silly.

The aid stations were fantastic - there were two, one each time the trail crossed a park road, which were conveniently about halfway around the perimeter from each other - and the whole event went well, if slower than either of us could have done normally. But as a final trail race for 2014, it was ideal.

A race photographer took this awesome picture of me on the course.

I'm not sure I'll do this event next year, because it is scheduled around some other races I have my eye on. One of those is Stone Mill; I'm actually in it this year but there is no way I can finish it (and enjoy myself) so I won't start. Another race that I am interested in is Mountain Masochist. Both are 50 milers so they would be a step up.